Comicsphere: Batman, Judge Dredd – The Ultimate Riddle

After reading the first team up between Dredd and Batman it was almost inevitable that I was going to be around for the second one. This one definitely didn’t pack the same punch as Judgment In Gotham though. The premise is fairly simple and fairly similar — to place two iconic figures with different perspectives on how to deal with criminals in places where they are fish out of water and to see how they react both to their strange situation and to the person they have been forced to team up with.
The art is just as good as Judgment but the story seems very thin. The villain is not as menacing and he reads like one of those campy figures that were present in the worst of both titles. Batman had his silly foes and so did Dredd. Judgment had the Dark Judges and with the weight of some of the things they have visited on Mega City One in the past bearing down on experienced readers and just the idea of Dredd carried to the ultimate extreme in a judge that will act without mercy will hit the new readers. But here, what do you have? Pantomime. And the ultimate riddle of the title? OK, well if that were the ultimate riddle then I don’t think many people would have had a hard time cracking it.
It seems to a degree that this may have just been a profit driven project, or if not that the people involved got overly excited just at the prospect of having these two together and forgot about the story. Like I said, it’s nice to look at, so even if the story doesn’t grab you the art will, and it’s short and it wasn’t expensive — so is there anything to complain about? Well, you kind of want some more meat to your story when there is such potential in a team-up like this. So, good but not good enough.